


the art of treachery

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: Maximum Ride - James Patterson
Genre: Gen, in which: nothing happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2019-09-06 20:46:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16840111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: Fang has been abducted by persons unknown; Max and Iggy talk about what to do.





	the art of treachery

Iggy shook her awake before dawn that morning. A pale light stained the rocks around them, and far below the pines that ringed the base of the cliff shone faintly green.

“What?” Max yawned, rubbing her eyes. “I thought Fang was on watch.”

“He’s gone,” Iggy said. “I heard a noise and when I got up, he wasn’t there. I don’t hear him anywhere either.”

“Maybe he went into town.” She unknotted her short braid with her fingers, combing the dirty hair by touch. They’d used the showers at a campground three days ago, and washed off in the lake the day before, but she was starting to feel downright disgusting.

Iggy shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He found one of her hands, pressed four or five metallic objects from his hand to hers. “I found footprints leading away from where he was sleeping. They ended in what looked like a fight happened. I found these.”

She squinted at them in the low, bluish light. Fang had always had better night vision than she did. The objects were small, a golden brassy color, and slightly hollow. “What do you think they are?”

“Max, they’re bullet casings.” He looked straight at her, and the illusion would’ve been eerie if he wasn’t her brother and she didn’t know he was pointing his face in the direction her voice had come from. His eyes, the irises a blurry, milky fog-color, even seemed to search her face for a reaction.

“They could be old. From hunters or something.” She yawned again. “We would have heard gunshots.”

“Not if they used silencers. It would’ve been quiet enough we might not have woken up.” Iggy looked worried, his hair sticking up in crazy corkscrews. There were faint red lines on his face from using the sleeve of his windbreaker as a pillow. “I found darts too. Since when do hunters use tranq darts?”

Max rubbed her forehead. Thank God, the Voice hadn’t rung in yet. “What, do you think it’s Itex? We got _rid_ of them. They’re done-zo. I’m telling you, he probably just flew into town to get tacos.”

Iggy folded his arms. “Then why did he leave his backpack?”

“OK.” The lassitude of interrupted sleep was finally starting to leave her head, and her stomach felt acidic with fear. If someone had taken Fang… why not the rest of them, too? “Fair point. Did you find any trace of where they might’ve gone?”

He shook his head. “I’m blind, not a magician. But his tracks stopped after the scuff marks. It was like they just vanished.”

“What are we gonna do?” They’d been headed noplace in particular, but with a flock member missing and no leads, what could they do now?

“Look for him?” Iggy scratched an itch on his left wing, fingers rustling through the oily feathers. “It might’ve been the School.”

“It could’ve been anybody,” Max said.

Iggy sighed. “True that. Just when I thought we were gonna get a break.”

“Yup.”

The sun rose above the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> The original author's notes cover this pretty well, but this ties directly into a very old fic of mine, and was written at a time when a surprising amount of people were reading said fic. So I replaced the original first chapter (a very long author's note) with a shorter note and this short piece.
> 
> I still do have the original version of that chapter, if for some bizarre reason you want to read it.
> 
> Posted to Tumblr 21 March 2014.
> 
> Original author's notes:
> 
> For what it’s worth, this ties immediately into a fic I wrote nine jillion years ago called [“The Art of Treachery”](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4170938/1/The-Art-of-Treachery). Which is why there are screwy canon implications.
> 
> (I wrote this because like ten people have read that fic this month alone, and the intro that was there before needed a touchup badly. So I revised the intro and added this short so that new readers wouldn’t just get dumped into a crappy author’s note.)


End file.
